A recent research study has shed some interesting light on the differences between Optimists and Pessimists. A study at UCL questioned volunteers to find out how optimistic they were and then conducted brain scans of their frontal lobes (the area of the brain that deals with processing errors) while telling them good and bad news about the risks of various calamities. Everyone’s brain scans showed increased activity when they heard good news – e.g the risk of a particular cancer was less than they had earlier predicted. However when participants were told bad news, the researchers found less activity in the frontal lobes of the brains of the Optimists i.e. the Optimists brains seemed to ignore information that was negative. In ‘science speak’, they concluded that optimism is tied to selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.
This information may be helpful in how we present information as part of our patient education process and even to ourselves. For example, for an Optimist the ‘Move for Health’ approach may be most beneficial i.e. telling them that “if you exercise regularly, you’ll feel better, your health will be enhanced and you will be more likely to avoid health issues associated with inactivity”. A more ineffective approach for this group of patients might be: ‘Move to prevent ill-health’ i.e. “if you don’t exercise regularly, you are more likely to suffer the ill-effects of poor health associated with inactivity and a sedentary lifestyle”.
But I wonder if this would be a better approach for a Pessimist? More research please….
Ref: Sharot T et al. How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality
Nature Neuroscience 2011:14;1475-1479, doi:10.1038/nn.2949
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